Obama's Libya Blundering Could Wreck His Presidency

Andrew Sullivan: He's getting the US tangled up in a 'dumb war'
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 31, 2011 11:50 AM CDT
Obama's Libya Blundering Could Wreck His Presidency
President Obama gestures during his speech on America's energy security Wednesday.   (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

Andrew Sullivan delivers a withering critique of President Obama on the news that CIA agents are on the ground covertly helping anti-Gadhafi rebels. It means the president has been "at best vague" and "at worst deceptive" in his public pronouncements, Sullivan writes at his Daily Dish blog at the Atlantic. This "emphatically must be where this war ends. No arms, no troops, and no more CIA shenanigans (God help us)." If not, this misguided war "could wreck, derail, and distract Obama's presidency."

Let's just hope the US hasn't actually starting arming the rebels, which would turn Libya into another Iraq, writes Sullivan. He thinks the president's supporters should be outraged. This "makes George Bush's request for a vote from Congress before committing the US to war in Iraq look like a model of democratic accountability. How dare this president commit this country to an open-ended involvement in a foreign country's civil war—in secret, with no real public debate and then presented as a fait accompli." (More Libya no-fly zone stories.)

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